As the electronic technology and fabrication technique advance, various electric appliances designated wit multimedia and multi-functionality have been provided. In order to comply with users' or consumers' operational habits, manufacturers have focused on developing humanized operation interfaces such as multi-linguistic operation interface, patterned selection interface, or sound operation indication functions, etc.
Besides the humanized operation interface or other additional functions, most of the manufacturers also provide a remote-control function for their products for sale so as to allow the users or consumers to benefit by the advanced technology. Such function further plays an important role for most of the users in determining if to purchase the products.
In fact, due to strong competition among the manufacturers and continuous changes of the users' expenditure trends, the manufacturers need to keep developing new functions for the products to bring forth the new and maintain their products on the market not out of date.
However, since the products made by different manufacturers have dedicated remote controllers thereof, and a single manufacturer provides various electric appliances with different specifications and functions, there result in plenty of various kinds of products having different specifications and functions for sale on the market. Even the electric appliances having the same use may be made with diverse specifications. For example of television, if a user has a television made by manufacture A, its remote controller from manufacture A normally does not work to control a television made by manufacture B. Moreover, since many electric appliances are currently used in a home such as television, air conditioner, DVD player, CD hi-fi, etc. each provided with a dedicated remote controller, this situation would confuse and cause inconvenience to the user, for example, using a wrong remote controller to operate the electric appliance or easily losing any of the remote controllers.
In light of the above problems, there have been disclosed the following solutions. Firstly, a code input method is to input control data of products from various manufacturers that are relatively more commonly used to a single remote controller, such that the user can input a code of the product to be controlled to the remote controller every time so as to record and operate the product. Secondly, a semi-automatic scanning method is to aim a remote controller at an electric appliance to be controlled and to consecutively press the On/Off button of the remote controller to output different frequency signals until the electric appliance generates a responsive On/Off action so as to record and operate the electric appliance. However, the above two methods not only require long time to obtain the responsive frequency but also are not suitable for all remote controllers from different manufacturers. In other words, since the same manufacturer may have a plurality of codes, it thus complicates the setting process and causes inconvenience in searching, and also an operation panel of the remote controller should be added with many switch buttons for more manufacturer specifications. In light of these drawbacks, Taiwanese Patent No. 558035 (“TW 558035” hereinafter) discloses a multi-functional remote controller for rapid automatic code search. The multi-function remote controller comprises a central processor having a plurality of memory devices, which store a plurality of frequencies at which a variety of electronic appliances manufactured by various manufacturers can operate; for example, the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, alone or in combination, are used to indicate the various manufacturers. Search address and codes of various products from the manufacturers are stored in a main memory and a second memory of the central processor, allowing a large amount of data to be categorized and then stored in the main memory and the second memory individually, such that the searching speed can be greatly increased and the operating time would be reduced. Therefore, TW 558035 employs a relatively more regular arrangement manner to store the corresponding remote-control frequencies of electric appliances from various manufacturers in the remote controller so as to overcome the prior-art drawback of difficulty in searching the control frequency and thereby raise the code-searching speed. However, TW 558035 still has a drawback that it lacks flexibility in use as being unable to be updated with the types of appliances. In other words, if the control frequencies of future-developed electric appliances are not collected in the remote controller, these electric appliances cannot be operated using the remote controller; thus, there is no real-time updating method for the remote controller to obtain the latest control frequencies. Therefore, the problem to be solved here is to provide a remote controller suitable for all digital electric appliances and capable of updating control frequencies in real time.